The decline led to shares in both carmakers falling by more than 2% on Monday.

"Investors had expectations going into 2014 of a much stronger US economic recovery than actually what we're seeing and we've had to reset our expectations,'' said Chris Gaffney, a senior market strategist at EverBank.

At the same time, many analysts have predicted that global markets are due for a correction, not least because of the sharp rise that has been seen over the past few months.

"What we're seeing in the markets so far this year may not be investors panicking about the turmoil in emerging markets, or the ongoing weaknesses in corporate earnings, or even the poor data coming out of the US for December and January," Craig Erlam, a market analyst at Alpari, told the Reuters news agency

"Instead, I believe these are all simply being used as an excuse for investors to allow for the significant correction that many investors have been calling for, for a number of months now."